There are dozens of large collections of texts (or of links to texts) available online, but only a few of them is of very high quality. Most of them you might find through a Google search are full of broken links, and have few or no notes as to who transcribed the texts, or how, or from what source.
If anyone has a source of texts that is (1) free, (2) comprehensive (contains a large part of “the canon” of Western literature at least), and (3) well-documented and constructed according to a reliable method, I will update this post with a link to the source. The best I know of are these: [1] The Online Books Page, [2] Project Gutenberg (of course), [3] Internet Archive: The Open-Access Text Archive....
The Open-Access Text Archive (archive.org) has the potential to become the best because it scans the original book, which (I think) usually provides all the information a scholar might need. The problem with its offerings is the idiosyncratic selection and the sometimes spotty proofing. In my own use of the resource I’ve come across several texts that were incomplete and had no indication of why. But that’s really being nit-picky. I expect great things from the Open Content Alliance, which manages this project.
The Text Outline Project has the potential to be a magnet for high-quality texts, however, because, unlike all of the above websites, it has a mission that requires texts that are credible to scholars. For me, as a scholar, there is no other way forward....The texts that we collate must be credible texts. If we must essentially create new editions, then so be it....Imagine, if you will, an entire library placed into a single database in which you can choose from a wide variety of categories to search. Imagine that you can search not just the texts of books (something not very hard to do now-there are many tools available), but outline headings, and text chunk summaries (this is Textop jargon) as well; imagine that you can return either text references (as a concordance or index does), or just outline headings, or text chunks; and imagine that you can do this all in multiple languages from the same interface (this last assumes we solve the hard problem of internationalization). Quite aside from the value of the outline itself, the value simply of having credible texts viewable and searchable all in one place, in multiple languages, as part of a single database, would be tremendous for scholars.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/17/2006 09:31:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
